Episode 068 - Handling Difficult Topics in YA Fiction with Emma G. Rose
March 2, 2021
YA author Emma G. Rose talks about the event that led her to write about suicide in her YA novels, how her goals for her book changed over time, how she approached her family about the topic of the book and how she interacts with her readers, and how she uses guidelines from her journalism background to avoid glamorizing the topic.
Emma G. Rose is a Maine author of contemporary fantasy, including NOTHING'S EVER LOST and NEAR-LIFE EXPERIENCE. She intended to become a kick-ass girl reporter like Nellie Bly. Then she spent a Christmas Eve standing on a riverbank waiting for rescue divers to pull a body from the water. That's when she stopped waiting and wandered off to explore the world instead.
"That's the story, right? Who the person was and who's left? That's the story. And so if you're focusing on those things, you're doing okay. And nothing's ever lost." —Emma G. Rose
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Emma Rose. Hey, Emma, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Emma: I'm well, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:11] Emma G. Rose is a Maine author of contemporary fantasy, including NOTHING'S EVER LOST and NEAR LIFE EXPERIENCE. She intended to become a kick ass girl reporter like Nellie Bly. Then she spent a Christmas Eve standing on a riverbank waiting for rescue divers to pull a body from the water, and that's when she stopped waiting and wandered off to explore the world instead.
[00:00:32] And so we're going to be talking today about addressing sensitive topics in YA works.
[00:00:37] And I think it makes sense to just start right out with what was that event that triggered your desire to write about a sensitive topic?
[00:00:46] Emma: Okay, so trigger warning here. I'm about to talk about suicide. If that's a problem for people, now would be the time to skip ahead. But my 17-year-old cousin died by suicide when I was 20, and I started writing with no intention of letting anyone read it. But I started writing as a way to deal with that reality, that this new and very scary and strange reality that I was living, where somebody that I loved, who was younger than me, had made this life ending choice. So I started writing NOTHING'S EVER LOST really as a way to cope for myself.
[00:01:28] And only later, after I'd had really written almost a first draft, did I start thinking other people may need this too, and what can I do to make this both safe for people, but also accessible and authentic to the things that people may be experiencing?
[00:01:45] Matty: Many people, I think, when they go into writing nonfiction books already had that idea that they want to share a lesson or share information, or they have an effect they want to have on the reader when the reader is done with their nonfiction book. But if you're writing fiction, that's slightly different. And you had said that you started it almost as a therapeutic exercise for yourself. So then as you started looking back on that first draft, what changes did you feel like you had to make as a result of now thinking that it was something you wanted to share with people?
[00:02:14] Emma: So the biggest thing is this story, it's not solely about this character who dies by suicide. There are other characters. He's not even the main character, but he's in the story and his story, what led him to make this decision and then how he felt afterward, I was able to play with because in my book NOTHING'S EVER LOST, the characters are already dead, so we're starting in the afterlife.
[00:02:36] So I could explore something that other people can't, which is how does it feel after the fact. And so for me, one of the things I wanted to look at was what do people who have survived suicide say about the experience? And almost universally if you ask them, what did you think immediately after, they said, I wish I hadn't have done it. I realized what a bad choice this was.
[00:03:00] And I think that in a lot of books that deal with suicide as a topic, they don't necessarily talk about that piece of it, that oftentimes the person who does this immediately feels like, Oh, I overreacted or I reacted to an immediate problem with a permanent solution, or any of those sort of platitudes we say.
[00:03:20] And so that was something I wanted to get right. I wanted to be able to have the character have an authentic thought and an authentic expression of how he actually felt and what he felt was regret. Guilt. He knows only after the fact when his personal situation is now different. Now he's thinking about the people he left behind and what that might've done to them. And so that was one thing that I wanted to address.
[00:03:43] But I also wanted to address what happens to the people left behind. And I think a lot of times books that deal with this topic tend to focus very closely on the event itself and the immediate aftermath. And there's a reason for that. It's because it's awful and there's a lot of work that can happen there. But I also wanted to look at the 10, 15, 20 years down the line, what happens to the family members after the fact? I'm not going to spoil it, but there is a cameo appearance by someone who helps this character to see how the world has changed as a result of his act.
[00:04:22] And the truth is it's not all negative and it's not all positive. It's a little bit of both, because depending on your circumstances, you can take any traumatic experience and use it for good or for bad, right? You can take a traumatic experience and you can let it crush you and you can feel trapped and lost and not reach out and you're stuck. Or you can take a traumatic experience and you can grow from it, learn from it, use it as inspiration to do something else. And so this character got to see what his act, which he felt very guilty about and bad about, what that act did to affect the people that he left behind. And I think that was important because it saw past the initial drama of the act.
[00:05:10] It's not glamorizing the act. And that's the thing I was most concerned about is I don't want to glamorize this. If you look at research done, there used to be a lot of fear. We couldn't even say the word. When my uncle went to speak to what would have been my cousin's graduating class, he was invited to speak, and right before he went on stage, they said, don't say the word suicide. And he went, everybody knows. It's not a secret. But adults at the time were so fearful that even saying the word, even talking about it, would lead someone to this act. ...
[00:00:06] Emma: I'm well, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:11] Emma G. Rose is a Maine author of contemporary fantasy, including NOTHING'S EVER LOST and NEAR LIFE EXPERIENCE. She intended to become a kick ass girl reporter like Nellie Bly. Then she spent a Christmas Eve standing on a riverbank waiting for rescue divers to pull a body from the water, and that's when she stopped waiting and wandered off to explore the world instead.
[00:00:32] And so we're going to be talking today about addressing sensitive topics in YA works.
[00:00:37] And I think it makes sense to just start right out with what was that event that triggered your desire to write about a sensitive topic?
[00:00:46] Emma: Okay, so trigger warning here. I'm about to talk about suicide. If that's a problem for people, now would be the time to skip ahead. But my 17-year-old cousin died by suicide when I was 20, and I started writing with no intention of letting anyone read it. But I started writing as a way to deal with that reality, that this new and very scary and strange reality that I was living, where somebody that I loved, who was younger than me, had made this life ending choice. So I started writing NOTHING'S EVER LOST really as a way to cope for myself.
[00:01:28] And only later, after I'd had really written almost a first draft, did I start thinking other people may need this too, and what can I do to make this both safe for people, but also accessible and authentic to the things that people may be experiencing?
[00:01:45] Matty: Many people, I think, when they go into writing nonfiction books already had that idea that they want to share a lesson or share information, or they have an effect they want to have on the reader when the reader is done with their nonfiction book. But if you're writing fiction, that's slightly different. And you had said that you started it almost as a therapeutic exercise for yourself. So then as you started looking back on that first draft, what changes did you feel like you had to make as a result of now thinking that it was something you wanted to share with people?
[00:02:14] Emma: So the biggest thing is this story, it's not solely about this character who dies by suicide. There are other characters. He's not even the main character, but he's in the story and his story, what led him to make this decision and then how he felt afterward, I was able to play with because in my book NOTHING'S EVER LOST, the characters are already dead, so we're starting in the afterlife.
[00:02:36] So I could explore something that other people can't, which is how does it feel after the fact. And so for me, one of the things I wanted to look at was what do people who have survived suicide say about the experience? And almost universally if you ask them, what did you think immediately after, they said, I wish I hadn't have done it. I realized what a bad choice this was.
[00:03:00] And I think that in a lot of books that deal with suicide as a topic, they don't necessarily talk about that piece of it, that oftentimes the person who does this immediately feels like, Oh, I overreacted or I reacted to an immediate problem with a permanent solution, or any of those sort of platitudes we say.
[00:03:20] And so that was something I wanted to get right. I wanted to be able to have the character have an authentic thought and an authentic expression of how he actually felt and what he felt was regret. Guilt. He knows only after the fact when his personal situation is now different. Now he's thinking about the people he left behind and what that might've done to them. And so that was one thing that I wanted to address.
[00:03:43] But I also wanted to address what happens to the people left behind. And I think a lot of times books that deal with this topic tend to focus very closely on the event itself and the immediate aftermath. And there's a reason for that. It's because it's awful and there's a lot of work that can happen there. But I also wanted to look at the 10, 15, 20 years down the line, what happens to the family members after the fact? I'm not going to spoil it, but there is a cameo appearance by someone who helps this character to see how the world has changed as a result of his act.
[00:04:22] And the truth is it's not all negative and it's not all positive. It's a little bit of both, because depending on your circumstances, you can take any traumatic experience and use it for good or for bad, right? You can take a traumatic experience and you can let it crush you and you can feel trapped and lost and not reach out and you're stuck. Or you can take a traumatic experience and you can grow from it, learn from it, use it as inspiration to do something else. And so this character got to see what his act, which he felt very guilty about and bad about, what that act did to affect the people that he left behind. And I think that was important because it saw past the initial drama of the act.
[00:05:10] It's not glamorizing the act. And that's the thing I was most concerned about is I don't want to glamorize this. If you look at research done, there used to be a lot of fear. We couldn't even say the word. When my uncle went to speak to what would have been my cousin's graduating class, he was invited to speak, and right before he went on stage, they said, don't say the word suicide. And he went, everybody knows. It's not a secret. But adults at the time were so fearful that even saying the word, even talking about it, would lead someone to this act. ...
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[00:05:41] And the truth is as with any traumatic experience, traumatic event, it's not the thing itself that invites people to replicate it. It's the glamour around it. So if you make it look really glamorous and beautiful and like this fainting couch sort of Gothic beauty of the person who's died and now we're all worshiping them, yeah, you can actually. incite other impressionable people to maybe make this choice.
[00:06:08] If you show the reality of it, which, in fiction, that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to show the reality. If you're showing the reality of it, it turns out that people actually work through those emotions and they can think about them on a more analytical level and really work through them rather than just being like, Oh, I could do that and then I'd be the star and everybody would look at me, right?
[00:06:28] Matty: It's like the Romeo and Juliet syndrome.
[00:06:30] Emma: Yes. I think Romeo and Juliet is a really dangerous thing to teach, honestly, because it doesn't always come with the necessary background, the necessary exploration into what have these people done. it's all about the literature, and I love literature and I love storytelling, but I also recognize that in fantasy and sci-fi, you can explore concepts that are dangerous, right? You can explore topics that would be difficult or impossible to explore in any other medium without being a non-fiction, without being like, here's what I'm trying to say.
[00:07:00] These are stories, and they allow people a sort of safety net that they can explore this topic with the buffer of, Oh, it's not real. It's not real, so it's okay for me to feel this way. It's okay for me to think about this and it doesn't have to be real. So that's a really long answer to that question.
[00:07:18] Matty: I'm curious as to when you were writing the story for yourself, was it YA aged characters. And was it originally for a YA aged audience?
[00:07:27] Emma: Yes. Yes.
[00:07:28] Matty: I guess it wasn't for an audience to begin with, but when you started thinking about it, was it always that age group for both the readers and the characters?
[00:07:34] Emma: It was definitely. The characters that first popped into my head were Jack and Anna, who didn't have names at the time. It was just a boy and a girl, and they were walking through this kind of barren landscape and they were arguing about whether or not they were dead. And it was kind of a a silly argument, the kind of thing you'd overhear if you saw two teenagers walking down the street together and they're bickering and being silly.
[00:07:51] So it was always teenagers and they were always about 17-ish, which I think is a direct reflection, because my cousin was 17. They definitely were always teenagers. And I definitely wanted to capture that experience. And I was only 20 at that point, I wasn't that much older than them. And I think that in many ways I was still in that space in my mind of being a teenager. I was out in the world for the first time. I had just graduated from college because I'm weird, but I still felt like a teenager inside sometimes. And so it was very much meant to be about teenagers for teenagers.
[00:08:27] The truth is, though, many adults have read it and have glowing reviews. So I don't think you ever really grow out of some of those things that you want to explore as a teenager.
[00:08:37] Matty: I'm just rereading THE HUNGER GAMES, so YA doesn't limit it only to YA aged readers. So what was your family's reaction when they, first of all, found out that you were thinking of publishing this and then when it was out?
[00:08:51] Emma: I was cautious. I talked directly to my uncle, the father of my cousin who had died, because I wanted to make sure that he felt okay with this. I wanted him to know what I was doing. I didn't want it to be a surprise. This is not the kind of thing you surprise someone with. I talked to him about it and he loved it.
[00:09:06] Because he also has gone out and done a lot of advocacy work. He's in Massachusetts, he's done a lot of work with getting mental health awareness training into schools. He's spoken to the legislature. He's done a lot. So he was very supportive of this idea of if this is what you need to do to feel better, if this is going to help, and then you've been respectful with it, which he knew I had, because he'd read it, then I'm a hundred percent behind you.
[00:09:33] And the rest of my family, it was interesting because they read it, and there are several of my family members represented in this book, as mostly people who've passed away, but there are several of them in the book. And it's funny because a lot of my living family members came back to me and said, This really made me feel better. I really felt a sense of closure or a sense of the knowledge, the ability to think through how he felt after the fact and the ability to feel like maybe he was okay now. He was in a place where he was okay. That was really important to us.
[00:10:02] And I think the family was very supportive of that journey, and bonus points if we actually get to help some people who are struggling with this particular thing or with grief in general. The book is really about what happens when you die and what about the people you leave behind and what journey might you be going on next? And those are things that, people aren't always comfortable thinking about.
[00:10:22] Matty: Did you have beta readers? It sounded like your uncle got an early view of this. So did other people read it?
[00:10:29] Emma: I did have beta readers. I had a few of the different ages and reading levels. And I’m a big fan of beta readers because I think it's easy to get too close to your work and to not always see the problems. And frankly, this book, this first novel, has problems. It's the first novel. So there are holes, there are things that sort of wander off and don't come back. But overwhelmingly the feedback that I got was this is really emotionally powerful, and I wasn't expecting it to be.
[00:10:55] It's funny, because teenagers are funny. They're just naturally funny. They can't help it. So it's funny and it's playful and it deals with really intense topics. And so that combination of those two things is emotionally intense. And so I got a lot of feedback like, why didn't you tell me I was going to cry?
[00:11:12] Matty: How did you weigh salting in the humor in such a serious topic?
[00:11:17] Emma: I think that we have this false idea that you can't be funny and be sad at the same time. And honestly, a lot of situations that are sad are also funny because funny is just unexpected. We laugh when something's unexpected. And so to look at the funny things that come up, and that's really healthy, I think, the ability to laugh. And so I never shied away if I found something funny, if I had my characters and the situation, and I was like, Oh that's funny, I leaned on that. I pushed it. Because I think in real life, when you're dealing with a major life change or the loss of a person or the loss of an idea, even, you can be almost rescued, pulled out of the darkest parts, by humor. And if you're afraid to laugh because you think it's somehow disrespectful, I think you've limited yourself. you've kind of blocked out your exits.
[00:12:12] So I was never afraid to be funny and I was never afraid to let the characters be funny, because I'm not funny, but the characters are funny. And sometimes I think there was humor in places that I didn't even see it, where other people would say, Oh, that was hilarious. And I was like, Oh yeah, I guess.
[00:12:27] Matty: The answer would probably be different if we weren't in the middle of a COVID pandemic, but do you have platforms or venues where you're interacting with your YA aged readers?
[00:12:38] Emma: Yes. I love interacting with all the readers, but particularly
[00:12:43] YA readers. I love going into high schools, I love going to colleges, which obviously I'm not doing at the moment, but I'd love to do that. So if anybody wants a speaker, I'm here. I'd like to talk. But I do have those channels where I speak to them, readers of all ages. Plus I have the online spaces. I'm on Facebook and Instagram and all of those places as well.
[00:13:03] Matty: So when you're having these interactions with people of any age, do you go into it having in mind a threshold beyond which you don't want to engage with that person, if the person starts saying things that make you think that they're suicidal or are considering that.
[00:13:23] Emma: I have yet to have someone come to me and express that, or even to have me suspect they might be thinking about it. I do have a mental checklist of if I heard or saw these things, things like over identifying with that character or anything blatant, If anyone asks me for help, I do know what to do. There are hotlines that people can call. There's texting now, you can actually text a crisis hotline. And I would talk to them about, what are you feeling and who can you talk to in your personal life? Because I don't know you well enough to really help you, but I want to help you. So who can I connect you with to help you?
[00:13:59] And I think that's the thing. I'm not a licensed anything, right? I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a grief counselor. I've done a lot of research on my own, but I have no formal training in this. And so I see my role as the ability to connect people with what they need, if they do come to me and say, I'm not safe.
[00:14:17] And I have no problem with asking someone, are you thinking about hurting yourself? Are you thinking about suicide? Those are two separate questions, first of all, that people don't always realize. But I had no problem with asking those questions because I think sometimes, you need to ask that question. Somebody needs to hear someone else say it and then they can say yes, and we can move on from there. But I'm not a counselor and it's not my job and I don't have the credentials to do it. So I don't want to put anyone else in danger by trying to help them in ways that aren't helpful.
[00:14:45] The real thing that I get most often, though, almost every interaction I've had, almost every event that I've done, a reading, whatever, I have someone come to me and say, I was suicidal and I'm better now, and this book spoke to me. Or I had a friend, family member, coworker, somebody died by suicide and this helped. Or my favorite is I have friend, family, and whatever connection who is struggling with grief, and they've been grieving for a long time. And I never understood that grief because people think, and partially it's in society, that grief is a finite thing, right? We think that you grieve, you put on your widow's weeds and your black veil and you grieve for a period of time and then you stop. And that's not true.
[00:15:37] One of the things that I was trying to show in this book and in every book that I write is that grief is an ongoing process. The new book I'm working on now, the character Ella is 11 years past Jack's death, past the first main character's death, and she was six when he died and now she's 17. And so she is trying to deal with the grief that grew with her. She was a child, and that grief grows with you and the things that you can't process when you're six, you can process when you're 17 and when you're 27.
[00:16:11] And so I think it's given people an understanding of what grief looks like and why it's not, oh, and then I felt better. Because you can't. And that's the feedback I get, and that's the feedback I really love because that's the whole point of this. It's a story. And I like the story and I love the characters and I love the world, but ultimately, I've done my job if I've made you think about your real world and the real people around you in a different way.
[00:16:39] Matty: I think that's the Holy Grail of every fiction author's career or non-fiction author's career to hear that kind of feedback. That's really quite extraordinary. Do you ever have the situation where maybe a parent is asking you about the appropriateness of the book for a younger YA reader and says, how disturbing is this? I struggled with this occasionally, like at book fairs, I would get parents asking about my books and say, how violent is this? And I would kind of be stumped to answer it because it's so subjective. And my answer probably would be different if I was in the middle of reading SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, I'd probably say, Oh, it's not violent at all. And if I wasted the middle of reading, Agatha Christy, I would say, Oh, it's quite violent.
[00:17:26] So do you have that situation where a parent or a reader is saying how disturbing is this? And if you do, how do you address that question?
[00:17:34] Emma: I've definitely had that question a couple of times, even from, people who are close to me who were like, can I let my kid read this? And you're right, the answer is definitely subjective. And so I don't try to give them a number. I say it's aimed at teenagers, but younger people can read it, but here's what you should know before you let your child read it. First of all, I think you should read it first because there are heavy topics here. But what you should know is there is a character that dies by suicide. There is a car accident that results in death, and there is a scary guy who's been in an accident and is very scary for a short period of time.
[00:18:09] My concern with people reading this too young is to not have the tools to deal with it. But I also think that younger people are more exposed to these things than you think. I've had friends who were suicidal when they were 10 and no adult wants to think that. We want to believe that children are these innocent creatures who don't have these problems that we have as adults.
[00:18:33] But I think it is subjective. And it's about what has your child experienced? If they've had a death in their family, I think they should read this book. I think it could help. It could give them a story that they can follow. But if your child has not had these experiences and has expressed no particular concerns about the afterlife or about death or about what happened when my friend died? If you haven't had those experiences, then I don't think this is the right book for them. That this can wait until they're older. It's really about the maturity level of the child, where are they on the spectrum. There are 12-year-olds who I think should read it, and there are 17-year-olds who probably shouldn't, because it's not time for them to read this book.
[00:19:12] Matty: Any of this advice you're offering about the approach you took for your YA books, would you have any different advice if you had been writing this for an adult audience or for people who were writing a book about suicide for an adult audience?
[00:19:25] Emma: No. I think that regardless of who you're speaking to, the truth is it's a confusing and scary topic. Many people are afraid of it and are still holding onto the stigma of even speaking the word. And the more that we talk about it in respectful ways, and the more that we talk about the reality of it versus the glitz and glitter, Hollywood version of it, I think the better off we all are. If you're writing about any of these topics -- suicide, grief, any of those things -- do your research. There are guidelines out there. I was in journalism for years and there are guidelines in the AP style book that tell you, how do we deal with this topic? And so go looking for those guidelines and make sure that you are approaching them in a way that is as safe as possible for the reader.
[00:20:15] Matty: What are some of those guidelines?
[00:20:17] Emma: Some of those guidelines include not glamorizing. Not talking about the method. If you know anything about journalism history, there were sometimes, and I want to say the nineties, early nineties, where there were suicide chains where somebody would die by suicide in a small town, and then they'd report on it, and then there'd be a bunch of other deaths. And oftentimes those focused a lot on the drama of finding the person and the method by which they died. And those things really aren't important. The fact of the matter is the person is gone and we, the survivors, are here dealing with that loss.
[00:20:55] That's the story, right? Who the person was and who's left? That's the story. And so if you're focusing on those things, you're doing okay. And nothing's ever lost. Actually, there's a scene that I went back and forth several times about whether to include, I actually removed it entirely in one draft, where you see Ricky, who is the character who dies by suicide, you see him immediately after his death. The second after his death, you see him as a ghost in the world. and the character Death, because I personified death in all of my books, the character Death comes to take him, and he asks to stay and to watch what happens.
[00:21:35] And so we see that what happens. We see his father running into the room, we see the attempts to bring him back, we see the 911 call, or at least we see somebody being told to call 911. So you see that sort of chaos afterwards. And I was really concerned about that. Because that, for me, was the most emotional part of this whole book. It was a struggle to write. It was a struggle to reread. It was a nightmare to edit because it was just crying, trying to write, you know. But I ended up including it because I think that it does make that point.
[00:22:05] It does bring you to that realization that I want people to have, which is a person who dies by suicide usually regrets the choice. And as far as we can tell from the people who survived, even things like jumping off bridges where like they shouldn't have survived, they did, and then they immediately said, that was a bad choice. I shouldn't have done that. And we see the chaos that leaves behind, and most people don't really want that. They want a stop to their feelings, whatever that feeling is, that's getting them to that point. That's what they're trying to stop. They're not trying to disrupt the whole world. They're not trying to make their family sad. And showing that those parts, those kinds of aftereffects, I thought was what needed to happen, difficult as it was for me to do and for my family to read. It took my grandmother a year and a half to finally read the book, because she said, I opened it up and I looked at the dedication, which is dedicated to my cousin, I looked to the dedication, I closed it and I left the book for six months.
[00:23:03] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. That would be tough. But it's good that she sounds like she eventually did do it.
[00:23:10] Emma: And she did.
[00:23:11] Matty: So we're going to change tacks a bit because I also wanted to talk with you about some independent publishing topics. And I think this might be a good segue, that I love the name of your imprint, which is Imperative Press. Talk a little bit about where the name Imperative Press came from.
[00:23:27] Emma: So as usually happens to me, I was lying awake in bed late one night, unable to stop thinking about, what am I going to name my press? And I realized that what I wanted people to get from it was these are books you have to read, you need these books. And so imperative means, do the thing. You have to do this. I did Latin in school, so the imperative case is like, go wash your hands. Go do the thing. And so for me, I was like, Oh, that's perfect. And I Googled it, of course, to see are there any other Imperative Presses out there and there weren't.
[00:24:02] There was nobody in the US. There was nobody on YouTube. There was nobody anywhere I could find. So I was like, this is perfect. This is the right answer. And then my tagline is, must read books, which I like, because you could take it as these are books that you must read, or you can take it as you must read books of any sort.
[00:24:18] So that's how I came to that. It wasn't any sort of like deep market research or anything. It was really what do I want people to know when they see my branding and that's what I wanted them to know.
[00:24:27] Matty: That's a great backstory. I really like that. The other indie publishing topic I wanted to ask about is that early on.
[00:24:34] Emma: when I was originally pulling your bio, I think I found one that was from a little while ago and it referenced speculative fiction. And then later bios reference contemporary fantasy. So talk about what you were encountering when you were billing your books as speculative fiction, and then what you hope to achieve or have achieved by billing them instead as contemporary fantasy.
[00:24:55] So genre and categories is really subjective, and it's hard to find the right one for your book, especially once you get past like the sort of figureheads. It's easy to say, my book that happens in space is probably sci-fi, but it's a little harder when you're talking about my book that deals with an EMT who has the power to see dead people and doesn't know what to do with it.
[00:25:19] It's different. And so how do you categorize that? My initial categorization of speculative fiction I actually like better personally because speculative fiction is "what if," and you speculate on the what and if so, what if you died, and it turned out there was a whole other world there and now you have to navigate it? What if you had an accident that resulted in this weird power, and now you have to figure out what to do with it? What if your brother died 11 years ago and now you're having weird dreams and passing out for no reason? You create the scenario and then you answer the question. And I like that.
[00:26:01] The problem is most readers don't know what speculative fiction is. If you say, Oh, I write speculative fiction, even a group of writers, I remember going to my writing group back in the before times when we could go to writing groups, going to my writing group, and we do the thing where we'd introduce each other around the table because we'd have new people. And I said that I wrote speculative fiction. I actually had people stop me and say, what does that mean? So that tells me that if my writer friends who write specifically fantasy and sci-fi don't know that term, it's probably not a good term in terms of marketing.
[00:26:31] So contemporary fantasy is a broader term. I feel like there are lots of things that can go under that bucket, but it is more accessible to the reader. They know what contemporary means. They know what fantasy is. They can make an educated guess about what contemporary fantasy is.
[00:26:47] Matty: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right about speculative fiction because I went for a long time thinking that speculative fiction meant speculative about the style, not the content of it. So almost like experimental fiction, and I would think that anything called experimental fiction, that would be the death knell of most of your sales. Most readers aren't looking for experimental fiction.
[00:27:09] Emma: Right, right. You have to be like an English major to read experimental fiction.
[00:27:14] Matty: It's also interesting because what you're describing about your books in terms of the afterlife and things like that, that's all very much what I address in the Ann Kinnear novels. And I always build them as paranormal suspense or supernatural suspense, but I think it makes sense that contemporary fantasy feels more YA, more appropriate for YA, whereas I think it would imply something different for adult readers. That's just my impression that I don't have anything to back that up.
[00:27:41] Emma: Me either, but I also nodding along because I think that's probably true. And I think that terms like paranormal, I think that there are some very clear tropes, like with any genre, there are established tropes of things that should be included. And I think that when I hear paranormal, I think ghosts, which, while I deal with the afterlife and I used the term ghosts earlier, I don't really mean ghosts. And not ghosts in the sense of, Ooh, I'm haunting you. I think that we have to be careful as we categorize our books. You may think, and you may even really be, writing in a specific genre, but are you meeting the tropes? Are you meeting the expectations of that reader?
[00:28:20] If I bill something even as urban fantasy, which I thought when I started this, I thought I was doing urban fantasy, but in reality, urban fantasy is almost always a kick ass female protagonist, who's going to go out and slay the monsters, right? I don't have any of that in my books. So I'm not really writing urban fantasy, even though it's happening in cities and it's fantasy, is that urban fantasy? There's a lot of layers to this and it does take some experimentation.
[00:28:46] It helps if you have comp books, other books that you feel are close to yours, which with NOTHING'S EVER LOST was really hard to do, because I think I've read one or two books in my whole life that I would categorize it as similar in terms of the story elements.
[00:28:59] Matty: I think finding comps is the most difficult thing an author needs to do for advertising and for marketing purposes. And I found that my choice of supernatural suspense and paranormal suspense was largely driven by the fact that if I went to platforms like BookBub and I had to pick from a list of genres, one of those was usually in the list. And so I gravitated to that just because the platforms I was trying to get onto, that was the choice I had but, yeah, I think it's great advice for people to go to where they think people would search on the online retail platforms for their book, and then see what else pops up because the urban fantasy is a perfect example, if the young female protagonist isn't wearing black leather, it's probably not really urban fantasy.
[00:29:46] Emma: Exactly. Well, and the other thing you can do, now that we're talking about this, the other thing is to ask your beta readers is, what book does this remind you of? Because I think that for an author, it's really easy to be like, my book is unique in all the world. And that's kind of true because you're, so enmeshed in it, all the intricacies, that you're like, it's not really like THE HUNGER GAMES because this, this and this, and it's not like Harry Potter because this, this and this. But your readers can go, Oh, this really reminds me of Percy Jackson. And then you're like, oh, okay. And if it reminds them, then it'll remind others. So that's a really good way to find your comps, even if you're kind of lost on what they might be.
[00:30:22] Matty: Yeah, I do like that advice. Well, Emma, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting and enlightening conversation. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your books online.
[00:30:34] Emma: Okay. I have two websites, one for me, and one for the press. So I'm at EmmaGAuthor.com and the press is ImperativePressBooks.com. And then I'm on all the socials as Imperative Press.
[00:30:48] Matty: Great. Thank you.
[00:06:08] If you show the reality of it, which, in fiction, that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to show the reality. If you're showing the reality of it, it turns out that people actually work through those emotions and they can think about them on a more analytical level and really work through them rather than just being like, Oh, I could do that and then I'd be the star and everybody would look at me, right?
[00:06:28] Matty: It's like the Romeo and Juliet syndrome.
[00:06:30] Emma: Yes. I think Romeo and Juliet is a really dangerous thing to teach, honestly, because it doesn't always come with the necessary background, the necessary exploration into what have these people done. it's all about the literature, and I love literature and I love storytelling, but I also recognize that in fantasy and sci-fi, you can explore concepts that are dangerous, right? You can explore topics that would be difficult or impossible to explore in any other medium without being a non-fiction, without being like, here's what I'm trying to say.
[00:07:00] These are stories, and they allow people a sort of safety net that they can explore this topic with the buffer of, Oh, it's not real. It's not real, so it's okay for me to feel this way. It's okay for me to think about this and it doesn't have to be real. So that's a really long answer to that question.
[00:07:18] Matty: I'm curious as to when you were writing the story for yourself, was it YA aged characters. And was it originally for a YA aged audience?
[00:07:27] Emma: Yes. Yes.
[00:07:28] Matty: I guess it wasn't for an audience to begin with, but when you started thinking about it, was it always that age group for both the readers and the characters?
[00:07:34] Emma: It was definitely. The characters that first popped into my head were Jack and Anna, who didn't have names at the time. It was just a boy and a girl, and they were walking through this kind of barren landscape and they were arguing about whether or not they were dead. And it was kind of a a silly argument, the kind of thing you'd overhear if you saw two teenagers walking down the street together and they're bickering and being silly.
[00:07:51] So it was always teenagers and they were always about 17-ish, which I think is a direct reflection, because my cousin was 17. They definitely were always teenagers. And I definitely wanted to capture that experience. And I was only 20 at that point, I wasn't that much older than them. And I think that in many ways I was still in that space in my mind of being a teenager. I was out in the world for the first time. I had just graduated from college because I'm weird, but I still felt like a teenager inside sometimes. And so it was very much meant to be about teenagers for teenagers.
[00:08:27] The truth is, though, many adults have read it and have glowing reviews. So I don't think you ever really grow out of some of those things that you want to explore as a teenager.
[00:08:37] Matty: I'm just rereading THE HUNGER GAMES, so YA doesn't limit it only to YA aged readers. So what was your family's reaction when they, first of all, found out that you were thinking of publishing this and then when it was out?
[00:08:51] Emma: I was cautious. I talked directly to my uncle, the father of my cousin who had died, because I wanted to make sure that he felt okay with this. I wanted him to know what I was doing. I didn't want it to be a surprise. This is not the kind of thing you surprise someone with. I talked to him about it and he loved it.
[00:09:06] Because he also has gone out and done a lot of advocacy work. He's in Massachusetts, he's done a lot of work with getting mental health awareness training into schools. He's spoken to the legislature. He's done a lot. So he was very supportive of this idea of if this is what you need to do to feel better, if this is going to help, and then you've been respectful with it, which he knew I had, because he'd read it, then I'm a hundred percent behind you.
[00:09:33] And the rest of my family, it was interesting because they read it, and there are several of my family members represented in this book, as mostly people who've passed away, but there are several of them in the book. And it's funny because a lot of my living family members came back to me and said, This really made me feel better. I really felt a sense of closure or a sense of the knowledge, the ability to think through how he felt after the fact and the ability to feel like maybe he was okay now. He was in a place where he was okay. That was really important to us.
[00:10:02] And I think the family was very supportive of that journey, and bonus points if we actually get to help some people who are struggling with this particular thing or with grief in general. The book is really about what happens when you die and what about the people you leave behind and what journey might you be going on next? And those are things that, people aren't always comfortable thinking about.
[00:10:22] Matty: Did you have beta readers? It sounded like your uncle got an early view of this. So did other people read it?
[00:10:29] Emma: I did have beta readers. I had a few of the different ages and reading levels. And I’m a big fan of beta readers because I think it's easy to get too close to your work and to not always see the problems. And frankly, this book, this first novel, has problems. It's the first novel. So there are holes, there are things that sort of wander off and don't come back. But overwhelmingly the feedback that I got was this is really emotionally powerful, and I wasn't expecting it to be.
[00:10:55] It's funny, because teenagers are funny. They're just naturally funny. They can't help it. So it's funny and it's playful and it deals with really intense topics. And so that combination of those two things is emotionally intense. And so I got a lot of feedback like, why didn't you tell me I was going to cry?
[00:11:12] Matty: How did you weigh salting in the humor in such a serious topic?
[00:11:17] Emma: I think that we have this false idea that you can't be funny and be sad at the same time. And honestly, a lot of situations that are sad are also funny because funny is just unexpected. We laugh when something's unexpected. And so to look at the funny things that come up, and that's really healthy, I think, the ability to laugh. And so I never shied away if I found something funny, if I had my characters and the situation, and I was like, Oh that's funny, I leaned on that. I pushed it. Because I think in real life, when you're dealing with a major life change or the loss of a person or the loss of an idea, even, you can be almost rescued, pulled out of the darkest parts, by humor. And if you're afraid to laugh because you think it's somehow disrespectful, I think you've limited yourself. you've kind of blocked out your exits.
[00:12:12] So I was never afraid to be funny and I was never afraid to let the characters be funny, because I'm not funny, but the characters are funny. And sometimes I think there was humor in places that I didn't even see it, where other people would say, Oh, that was hilarious. And I was like, Oh yeah, I guess.
[00:12:27] Matty: The answer would probably be different if we weren't in the middle of a COVID pandemic, but do you have platforms or venues where you're interacting with your YA aged readers?
[00:12:38] Emma: Yes. I love interacting with all the readers, but particularly
[00:12:43] YA readers. I love going into high schools, I love going to colleges, which obviously I'm not doing at the moment, but I'd love to do that. So if anybody wants a speaker, I'm here. I'd like to talk. But I do have those channels where I speak to them, readers of all ages. Plus I have the online spaces. I'm on Facebook and Instagram and all of those places as well.
[00:13:03] Matty: So when you're having these interactions with people of any age, do you go into it having in mind a threshold beyond which you don't want to engage with that person, if the person starts saying things that make you think that they're suicidal or are considering that.
[00:13:23] Emma: I have yet to have someone come to me and express that, or even to have me suspect they might be thinking about it. I do have a mental checklist of if I heard or saw these things, things like over identifying with that character or anything blatant, If anyone asks me for help, I do know what to do. There are hotlines that people can call. There's texting now, you can actually text a crisis hotline. And I would talk to them about, what are you feeling and who can you talk to in your personal life? Because I don't know you well enough to really help you, but I want to help you. So who can I connect you with to help you?
[00:13:59] And I think that's the thing. I'm not a licensed anything, right? I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a grief counselor. I've done a lot of research on my own, but I have no formal training in this. And so I see my role as the ability to connect people with what they need, if they do come to me and say, I'm not safe.
[00:14:17] And I have no problem with asking someone, are you thinking about hurting yourself? Are you thinking about suicide? Those are two separate questions, first of all, that people don't always realize. But I had no problem with asking those questions because I think sometimes, you need to ask that question. Somebody needs to hear someone else say it and then they can say yes, and we can move on from there. But I'm not a counselor and it's not my job and I don't have the credentials to do it. So I don't want to put anyone else in danger by trying to help them in ways that aren't helpful.
[00:14:45] The real thing that I get most often, though, almost every interaction I've had, almost every event that I've done, a reading, whatever, I have someone come to me and say, I was suicidal and I'm better now, and this book spoke to me. Or I had a friend, family member, coworker, somebody died by suicide and this helped. Or my favorite is I have friend, family, and whatever connection who is struggling with grief, and they've been grieving for a long time. And I never understood that grief because people think, and partially it's in society, that grief is a finite thing, right? We think that you grieve, you put on your widow's weeds and your black veil and you grieve for a period of time and then you stop. And that's not true.
[00:15:37] One of the things that I was trying to show in this book and in every book that I write is that grief is an ongoing process. The new book I'm working on now, the character Ella is 11 years past Jack's death, past the first main character's death, and she was six when he died and now she's 17. And so she is trying to deal with the grief that grew with her. She was a child, and that grief grows with you and the things that you can't process when you're six, you can process when you're 17 and when you're 27.
[00:16:11] And so I think it's given people an understanding of what grief looks like and why it's not, oh, and then I felt better. Because you can't. And that's the feedback I get, and that's the feedback I really love because that's the whole point of this. It's a story. And I like the story and I love the characters and I love the world, but ultimately, I've done my job if I've made you think about your real world and the real people around you in a different way.
[00:16:39] Matty: I think that's the Holy Grail of every fiction author's career or non-fiction author's career to hear that kind of feedback. That's really quite extraordinary. Do you ever have the situation where maybe a parent is asking you about the appropriateness of the book for a younger YA reader and says, how disturbing is this? I struggled with this occasionally, like at book fairs, I would get parents asking about my books and say, how violent is this? And I would kind of be stumped to answer it because it's so subjective. And my answer probably would be different if I was in the middle of reading SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, I'd probably say, Oh, it's not violent at all. And if I wasted the middle of reading, Agatha Christy, I would say, Oh, it's quite violent.
[00:17:26] So do you have that situation where a parent or a reader is saying how disturbing is this? And if you do, how do you address that question?
[00:17:34] Emma: I've definitely had that question a couple of times, even from, people who are close to me who were like, can I let my kid read this? And you're right, the answer is definitely subjective. And so I don't try to give them a number. I say it's aimed at teenagers, but younger people can read it, but here's what you should know before you let your child read it. First of all, I think you should read it first because there are heavy topics here. But what you should know is there is a character that dies by suicide. There is a car accident that results in death, and there is a scary guy who's been in an accident and is very scary for a short period of time.
[00:18:09] My concern with people reading this too young is to not have the tools to deal with it. But I also think that younger people are more exposed to these things than you think. I've had friends who were suicidal when they were 10 and no adult wants to think that. We want to believe that children are these innocent creatures who don't have these problems that we have as adults.
[00:18:33] But I think it is subjective. And it's about what has your child experienced? If they've had a death in their family, I think they should read this book. I think it could help. It could give them a story that they can follow. But if your child has not had these experiences and has expressed no particular concerns about the afterlife or about death or about what happened when my friend died? If you haven't had those experiences, then I don't think this is the right book for them. That this can wait until they're older. It's really about the maturity level of the child, where are they on the spectrum. There are 12-year-olds who I think should read it, and there are 17-year-olds who probably shouldn't, because it's not time for them to read this book.
[00:19:12] Matty: Any of this advice you're offering about the approach you took for your YA books, would you have any different advice if you had been writing this for an adult audience or for people who were writing a book about suicide for an adult audience?
[00:19:25] Emma: No. I think that regardless of who you're speaking to, the truth is it's a confusing and scary topic. Many people are afraid of it and are still holding onto the stigma of even speaking the word. And the more that we talk about it in respectful ways, and the more that we talk about the reality of it versus the glitz and glitter, Hollywood version of it, I think the better off we all are. If you're writing about any of these topics -- suicide, grief, any of those things -- do your research. There are guidelines out there. I was in journalism for years and there are guidelines in the AP style book that tell you, how do we deal with this topic? And so go looking for those guidelines and make sure that you are approaching them in a way that is as safe as possible for the reader.
[00:20:15] Matty: What are some of those guidelines?
[00:20:17] Emma: Some of those guidelines include not glamorizing. Not talking about the method. If you know anything about journalism history, there were sometimes, and I want to say the nineties, early nineties, where there were suicide chains where somebody would die by suicide in a small town, and then they'd report on it, and then there'd be a bunch of other deaths. And oftentimes those focused a lot on the drama of finding the person and the method by which they died. And those things really aren't important. The fact of the matter is the person is gone and we, the survivors, are here dealing with that loss.
[00:20:55] That's the story, right? Who the person was and who's left? That's the story. And so if you're focusing on those things, you're doing okay. And nothing's ever lost. Actually, there's a scene that I went back and forth several times about whether to include, I actually removed it entirely in one draft, where you see Ricky, who is the character who dies by suicide, you see him immediately after his death. The second after his death, you see him as a ghost in the world. and the character Death, because I personified death in all of my books, the character Death comes to take him, and he asks to stay and to watch what happens.
[00:21:35] And so we see that what happens. We see his father running into the room, we see the attempts to bring him back, we see the 911 call, or at least we see somebody being told to call 911. So you see that sort of chaos afterwards. And I was really concerned about that. Because that, for me, was the most emotional part of this whole book. It was a struggle to write. It was a struggle to reread. It was a nightmare to edit because it was just crying, trying to write, you know. But I ended up including it because I think that it does make that point.
[00:22:05] It does bring you to that realization that I want people to have, which is a person who dies by suicide usually regrets the choice. And as far as we can tell from the people who survived, even things like jumping off bridges where like they shouldn't have survived, they did, and then they immediately said, that was a bad choice. I shouldn't have done that. And we see the chaos that leaves behind, and most people don't really want that. They want a stop to their feelings, whatever that feeling is, that's getting them to that point. That's what they're trying to stop. They're not trying to disrupt the whole world. They're not trying to make their family sad. And showing that those parts, those kinds of aftereffects, I thought was what needed to happen, difficult as it was for me to do and for my family to read. It took my grandmother a year and a half to finally read the book, because she said, I opened it up and I looked at the dedication, which is dedicated to my cousin, I looked to the dedication, I closed it and I left the book for six months.
[00:23:03] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. That would be tough. But it's good that she sounds like she eventually did do it.
[00:23:10] Emma: And she did.
[00:23:11] Matty: So we're going to change tacks a bit because I also wanted to talk with you about some independent publishing topics. And I think this might be a good segue, that I love the name of your imprint, which is Imperative Press. Talk a little bit about where the name Imperative Press came from.
[00:23:27] Emma: So as usually happens to me, I was lying awake in bed late one night, unable to stop thinking about, what am I going to name my press? And I realized that what I wanted people to get from it was these are books you have to read, you need these books. And so imperative means, do the thing. You have to do this. I did Latin in school, so the imperative case is like, go wash your hands. Go do the thing. And so for me, I was like, Oh, that's perfect. And I Googled it, of course, to see are there any other Imperative Presses out there and there weren't.
[00:24:02] There was nobody in the US. There was nobody on YouTube. There was nobody anywhere I could find. So I was like, this is perfect. This is the right answer. And then my tagline is, must read books, which I like, because you could take it as these are books that you must read, or you can take it as you must read books of any sort.
[00:24:18] So that's how I came to that. It wasn't any sort of like deep market research or anything. It was really what do I want people to know when they see my branding and that's what I wanted them to know.
[00:24:27] Matty: That's a great backstory. I really like that. The other indie publishing topic I wanted to ask about is that early on.
[00:24:34] Emma: when I was originally pulling your bio, I think I found one that was from a little while ago and it referenced speculative fiction. And then later bios reference contemporary fantasy. So talk about what you were encountering when you were billing your books as speculative fiction, and then what you hope to achieve or have achieved by billing them instead as contemporary fantasy.
[00:24:55] So genre and categories is really subjective, and it's hard to find the right one for your book, especially once you get past like the sort of figureheads. It's easy to say, my book that happens in space is probably sci-fi, but it's a little harder when you're talking about my book that deals with an EMT who has the power to see dead people and doesn't know what to do with it.
[00:25:19] It's different. And so how do you categorize that? My initial categorization of speculative fiction I actually like better personally because speculative fiction is "what if," and you speculate on the what and if so, what if you died, and it turned out there was a whole other world there and now you have to navigate it? What if you had an accident that resulted in this weird power, and now you have to figure out what to do with it? What if your brother died 11 years ago and now you're having weird dreams and passing out for no reason? You create the scenario and then you answer the question. And I like that.
[00:26:01] The problem is most readers don't know what speculative fiction is. If you say, Oh, I write speculative fiction, even a group of writers, I remember going to my writing group back in the before times when we could go to writing groups, going to my writing group, and we do the thing where we'd introduce each other around the table because we'd have new people. And I said that I wrote speculative fiction. I actually had people stop me and say, what does that mean? So that tells me that if my writer friends who write specifically fantasy and sci-fi don't know that term, it's probably not a good term in terms of marketing.
[00:26:31] So contemporary fantasy is a broader term. I feel like there are lots of things that can go under that bucket, but it is more accessible to the reader. They know what contemporary means. They know what fantasy is. They can make an educated guess about what contemporary fantasy is.
[00:26:47] Matty: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right about speculative fiction because I went for a long time thinking that speculative fiction meant speculative about the style, not the content of it. So almost like experimental fiction, and I would think that anything called experimental fiction, that would be the death knell of most of your sales. Most readers aren't looking for experimental fiction.
[00:27:09] Emma: Right, right. You have to be like an English major to read experimental fiction.
[00:27:14] Matty: It's also interesting because what you're describing about your books in terms of the afterlife and things like that, that's all very much what I address in the Ann Kinnear novels. And I always build them as paranormal suspense or supernatural suspense, but I think it makes sense that contemporary fantasy feels more YA, more appropriate for YA, whereas I think it would imply something different for adult readers. That's just my impression that I don't have anything to back that up.
[00:27:41] Emma: Me either, but I also nodding along because I think that's probably true. And I think that terms like paranormal, I think that there are some very clear tropes, like with any genre, there are established tropes of things that should be included. And I think that when I hear paranormal, I think ghosts, which, while I deal with the afterlife and I used the term ghosts earlier, I don't really mean ghosts. And not ghosts in the sense of, Ooh, I'm haunting you. I think that we have to be careful as we categorize our books. You may think, and you may even really be, writing in a specific genre, but are you meeting the tropes? Are you meeting the expectations of that reader?
[00:28:20] If I bill something even as urban fantasy, which I thought when I started this, I thought I was doing urban fantasy, but in reality, urban fantasy is almost always a kick ass female protagonist, who's going to go out and slay the monsters, right? I don't have any of that in my books. So I'm not really writing urban fantasy, even though it's happening in cities and it's fantasy, is that urban fantasy? There's a lot of layers to this and it does take some experimentation.
[00:28:46] It helps if you have comp books, other books that you feel are close to yours, which with NOTHING'S EVER LOST was really hard to do, because I think I've read one or two books in my whole life that I would categorize it as similar in terms of the story elements.
[00:28:59] Matty: I think finding comps is the most difficult thing an author needs to do for advertising and for marketing purposes. And I found that my choice of supernatural suspense and paranormal suspense was largely driven by the fact that if I went to platforms like BookBub and I had to pick from a list of genres, one of those was usually in the list. And so I gravitated to that just because the platforms I was trying to get onto, that was the choice I had but, yeah, I think it's great advice for people to go to where they think people would search on the online retail platforms for their book, and then see what else pops up because the urban fantasy is a perfect example, if the young female protagonist isn't wearing black leather, it's probably not really urban fantasy.
[00:29:46] Emma: Exactly. Well, and the other thing you can do, now that we're talking about this, the other thing is to ask your beta readers is, what book does this remind you of? Because I think that for an author, it's really easy to be like, my book is unique in all the world. And that's kind of true because you're, so enmeshed in it, all the intricacies, that you're like, it's not really like THE HUNGER GAMES because this, this and this, and it's not like Harry Potter because this, this and this. But your readers can go, Oh, this really reminds me of Percy Jackson. And then you're like, oh, okay. And if it reminds them, then it'll remind others. So that's a really good way to find your comps, even if you're kind of lost on what they might be.
[00:30:22] Matty: Yeah, I do like that advice. Well, Emma, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting and enlightening conversation. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your books online.
[00:30:34] Emma: Okay. I have two websites, one for me, and one for the press. So I'm at EmmaGAuthor.com and the press is ImperativePressBooks.com. And then I'm on all the socials as Imperative Press.
[00:30:48] Matty: Great. Thank you.
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